Arizona coach Andre Tourigny said he expects All-Star forward Clayton Keller to be able to play Sunday night when the Coyotes travel to San Jose to play the Sharks in the second game of a back-to-back.
Keller extended his point streak to eight games with a second-period breakaway goal in a 4-1 loss to the Pittsburgh on Saturday in Glendale, Ariz., but he left the game in the third period after he hit the back of his head on the ice during a collision in front of the Penguins’ goal.
“He’s fine,” Tourigny said in his postgame news conference. “He should be OK for tomorrow. We’ll re-evaluate tomorrow, but he should be fine.”
The 23-year-old Keller leads Arizona in goals (27), assists (34) and points (61). He has six goals and nine assists during his eight-game point streak.
Arizona was 6-1 in March, including wins over NHL points leader Colorado (2-1 score) and at Toronto (5-4 in OT), before Saturday’s loss, which came after a five-game eastern swing.
Tourigny was asked if the trip — which also included stops in Detroit, Boston, Ottawa and Montreal, as well as Toronto — might have been partly to blame for his team’s sluggish effort against Pittsburgh, which finished with a 49-21 edge in shots on goal.
“It was pretty tough,” Tourigny said. “We didn’t have much, honestly. We had no pop. We had no fight. We had no execution. Our decisions were slow. From the coach to the players, everybody. That’s not about one guy. It’s disappointing.
“We over-passed the puck, we passed it when it was time to shoot, shot it when it was time to pass. The energy in the room before the game was good. It was just one of those nights.”
Still, the Coyotes were tied 1-1 until Pittsburgh’s Evgeni Malkin put in his rebound of a Bryan Rust pass with 7:24 remaining. Sidney Crosby followed with a pair of goals, including an empty-netter, to seal it.
“Third period we hoped to play a little bit better, but we had nothing,” Tourigny said.
Arizona doesn’t have much time to re-energize, with another road game just 24 hours later against the Sharks.
San Jose suffered its third straight loss, 5-3 to visiting Colorado on Friday, and is 12 points behind the Vegas Golden Knights in the battle for the final wild-card spot in the Western Conference.
San Jose fell behind 4-0 to the Avalanche but closed to within one goal on Erik Karlsson’s shot through traffic with 1:25 to go. Valeri Nichushkin sealed the win for the Avalanche with an empty-netter with 15 seconds left.
“I thought it was a hard-fought game,” Sharks coach Bob Boughner said. “I thought we played hard against these guys.”
“It was a good third period,” said Rudolfs Balcers, who cut San Jose’s deficit to 4-2 in the third period with his seventh goal of the season. “We were all over them and generated a lot of good chances. Obviously it’s frustrating to not get a point out of it, but that’s the way it goes.”
–Field Level Media
